HBO's Harry Potter Just Found Its Second Gilderoy Lockhart
Kit Harington is stepping in as Gilderoy Lockhart for Season 2 of HBO's Harry Potter series, replacing Nicholas Hoult after a scheduling exit.
Two actors, one vain professor, and Season 2 has not started filming yet.
Kit Harington has joined HBO’s Harry Potter series as Gilderoy Lockhart, stepping in after Nicholas Hoult, announced for the part weeks earlier, exited over scheduling conflicts with two other projects. Season 2, adapting Chamber of Secrets, is set to begin filming this autumn, ahead of Season 1’s Christmas 2026 premiere.
Lockhart was cast, uncast and recast inside one month
Hoult’s casting made headlines in mid-August. By the end of the month Deadline was reporting he had already dropped out: the Season 2 shoot needed to shift around his schedule and it stopped being workable alongside his existing commitments. Harington was announced days later.
It is the second Season 2 role this production has had to recast on short notice, after the scramble to replace Ginny Weasley over the summer. With seven books of casting still ahead, it is a useful reminder of how much can shift between an announcement and a first day on set.
Harington has already played the part once
He voiced Gilderoy Lockhart in last year’s Harry Potter: The Full-Cast Audio Editions, the star-studded audiobook reissue. Stepping into the same character on screen means he arrives fluent in Lockhart’s particular blend of vanity, charm and total incompetence, which is no small thing for a character whose entire arc depends on getting the tone exactly right.
Lockhart is the show-stealing Defence Against the Dark Arts professor of Chamber of Secrets, a self-promoting fraud with a shelf of ghostwritten memoirs, played in the 2002 film by Kenneth Branagh in one of that movie’s most purely fun performances. Whoever plays him carries a lot of the book’s comic relief, which is presumably why HBO moved fast rather than leaving the role open.
Season 2 remains on track to begin filming this autumn. Our living HBO series tracker has everyone confirmed across both seasons, including every recast along the way.
The joke underneath Lockhart, and the reason the character keeps working, is that he is the only Defence teacher in the series who is not secretly dangerous. He is just useless. After Quirrell, that should have been a relief.